SOURCE: Brown, Laura. “Affective Tragedy.” In English Dramatic Form, 1660-1760: An Essay in Generic History, pp. 86-95. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981.

In the following excerpt, Brown analyzes Otway's inclination, in The Orphan and Venice Preserv'd, to deviate from the model of heroic drama. Brown notes that Otway's innovations add sympathetic sentiment and are a harbinger of the change from aristocratic dramas to moral dramas aimed at a bourgeois audience.

Thomas Otway's mature affective drama, represented by The Orphan (1680) and Venice Preserved (1682), but clearly prefigured in the early near-heroic Don Carlos (1676) and Titus and Berenice (1676), reveals the depoliticization characteristic of the purest versions of the form. The simple domesticity of Otway's tragic plots entails not merely the choice of love over empire, which we have seen to be common to Dryden and Lee, but the elimination of empire altogether. Along with honor and empire, Otway necessarily eliminates...